


Happily Ever After

by Chiomi



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Child Abuse, Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-08-27 18:42:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8412430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chiomi/pseuds/Chiomi
Summary: You know that it won’t always be this dark. You were raised in love and sunlight, so you know exactly how bright things can be. You know the long night under your father’s thumb won’t last forever.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Reyxa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reyxa/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Have Courage](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6261043) by [Reyxa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reyxa/pseuds/Reyxa). 



> Very, very brief implication of some of Gabriel's friends doing unsavory things, but better over-tagged than under-warned.
> 
> I'm so, so happy this remix exchange could be a thing. I really hope everyone checks out the other works either in the collection or on [miraculousexchange](http://miraculousexchange.tumblr.com/tagged/mlremix2016).

You know how this ends.

You know that it won’t always be this dark. You were raised in love and sunlight, so you know exactly how bright things can be. You know the long night under your father’s thumb won’t last forever.

Sometimes that knowledge is hard to hold onto. The night is very dark, and the dark is full of monsters. You’ve learned to dodge most of their thick, grasping fingers, but learning to dodge doesn’t still your rabbit heart at the fact that they exist at all, that they were invited into what used to be a sanctuary. Your father doesn’t care about the violation of that sanctuary, and he invites the monsters back over and over.

You steel yourself. You try to temper in kindness borrowed from your memories and hope borrowed from your knowledge of the inevitable, eventual future, but you can still feel yourself getting sharper and more brittle than your mother ever would have wanted.

She wouldn’t have wanted any of this. If she had lived -

Well, she didn’t, and this is what you have now. You’ll survive it like you survived her initial loss. You can survive anything. You can be brave like you promised. You can square your shoulders and walk through the darkness and let it forge you until you can emerge into the light and glitter with it. You can be brave, though the darkness seems interminable.

Your father beats you like punctuation.

If the pattern holds steady, you are 43 beatings from reaching your majority and inheriting your mother’s estate and being free. When you are free, you can make your own light. Find a house and make it a home and never let shadows spill out and overflow the corners.

You know how this ends. It ends with you triumphant in the light.

Your father is chipping away at all the memories you have left of your mother, removing all the physical mementos to fund the drinking he does to forget the rest of his own memories. It’s tempting to wonder if he ever loved her because of how he’s let the house and garden she loved so much fall to wrack and ruin, but you know it is that love that drives the wreckage. It would be easier to hate him if you didn’t know. It would be easier to hate him if he wasn’t still your father. But he is, and so you just dream of escape. You’re not allowed to hate your father, right?

Probably right. In any case, there’s no room to hate him here. If you let hatred bubble up in you you’ll crack and you’ll give in to darkness yourself and then you’ll never escape, never be free.

You meet a girl with eyes like starlight, and she shouldn’t haunt you as much as she does. Your house is already so filled with the ghosts of your mother and your happiness both that you could choke on them. But she’d been free to ask for what she needed and she’d seemed happy in her skin and her eyes had been bright and fearless. You’d spoken fewer than thirty words to her, but you think you might love her.

It’s nothing to do, you tell yourself, with the way you’d fled this shadowed pit and found her in a patch of sunlight. You will make your own happiness eventually and you aren’t reliant on anyone else for it (you can’t be - if you’re reliant on anyone else you might end up just like your father when they leave you). You think about her a lot, though.

When your father has decided that you can be useful for more than menial household tasks and wants you to woo a princess, part of you knows that you’ve already found the only princess who can hold your attention for the moment. You don’t mention it. Secrets are the one thing left that you’re allowed to keep, as long as your father doesn’t know you have them.

You refuse to bend, and your father responds in a way you might have predicted, should have expected. He doesn’t like noncompliance in any form.

When the black cat appears and starts speaking, your initial thought is that all the rage and bitterness you push down, push down inside you have hardened and been excised from you: your own darkness given a physical form based on familiarity and the implications of destruction. Despite his abrasiveness, though, Plagg is far kinder than the worst of what you have inside you. He also has more fondness for cheese than you’ve ever harbored.

You know how this ends.

Deals with magical creatures, or even unasked-for favors from them, are prone to spectacular failure. You’re not sure how much more darkness you can survive with your sanity intact. You’re wary of magic from a creature who symbolizes bad luck, but you do want to see her again, and besides, your mother told you to be brave. You promised.

You go to the ball, and you dance with the girl with eyes like starlight. She’s a miracle, and you lose track of time until you have so little left that you need to bolt away.

-

Dawn is breaking as she arrives on your doorstep, and it’s the best kind of metaphor. Your shirt is back to old, your horses back to mice. You are your own self, beaten but not broken in this house, and you take her hand and step out into the morning. The sky flames pink and gold and the sun streaks out over the treetops. “Adrien,” she breathes. “I was looking for you. I didn’t want you to go.”

Your father comes up behind her and her retinue of guards, face like thunder, but she cuts him down with a glance, every inch the queen she will eventually be.

“You said you were my friend,” she says to you. You nod helplessly. “Good,” she says, a blush rising in her cheeks and her fingers tightening on yours. “You should come live in the palace and be my friend.”

It feels like the start of something. You don’t know how this ends. But you know you want to find out.

You go with her into the morning light.


End file.
